h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>> ..perhaps the roots of the word 'byzantine' - as in barely comprehensible in its complexity - would be worth mulling over. <<

Hmmm...
The etymology of byzantine seems simple enough, being anything typical of, or similar to, conditions in the town (or the larger empire) of Byzantium.

And yes, one meaning of byzantine, like rococo, suggests an overdone, even malignantly out of control, unnecessary complexity. Ironically this condition actually comes from trying to keep things simple.

dic.dot suggests one meaning of byzantine as:
"a bureaucratic over-elaboration bordering on lunacy: quadruple
banked agencies, dozens or even scores of superfluous levels
and officials with high flown titles unrelated to their actual
function, if any."

But note that the entry at dic.dot also goes on to say that this kind of obfuscation-by-complexity was designed soley to isolate the ONE from the many:

"Access to the Emperor and his council was controlled by
powerful and inscrutable eunuchs and by rival sports factions."

I never did mean to suggest that the mechanics of maintaining power based on a singular godhead or its single earthly representative (king, dictator, pope, whatever) could not be, or would not become, complicated. Indeed it must become complex, that is how life really is. But the masses prefer things simple, matter of fact and even facile.

Your examples of Saint Augustine and the Arabs bear witness to just how byzantine it can get when trying to defend the one-eyed monster of monotheism and its harmonically narrow and single-minded power structures. The history of philosophy and theology is filled with a lot of circular thought that misses the point:

To me the most obvious thing about the old philosophical question "How many angels can dance on a pinhead?" is one that no one else seems to notice. There is always only ONE pinhead mentioned. The assumption of ONE-ness is implicitly ingrained because it depends on complexity and sidebar issues like angel-counting to divert attention from the unlikely premise that there is only ONE answer, one god, one ruler, one law.

I contend that monotheism is "some sort of lacksadaisical soft option" only in that the masses who are subjected to it seem to like things to be simple and easy and user friendly. Those who control it, or want to take over control of it, are in a constant state of power struggle and manipulation. Behind the scenes, there is a huge byzantine bureaucracy maintaining the illusion of simplicity and ease of operation that we all buy into. Would you vote for someone who promised to make your life more complicated or asked you to think more deeply than your next meal or your next pint?

Fast food hamburgers don't just grow on trees y'know. It takes organisation, planning, timing, co-ordinated delivery systems and an orderly preparation process. Yes, this is complicated. But they aren't selling us the details of their inner workings, they are selling us the end product. The faces of the fast-food, entertainment, transportation, and religion industries, that the world wants and chooses to see, must be by definition and design simple, uncomplicated and easy. Or it won't sell.

Similarly politicians deal with very complex issues but have to reduce them to simple sound bites for mass consumption. Many are the mandarins who serve the ONE but we the people only want to see one face on the posters over the square. It's simpler that way.

And if it's not too much trouble, yes, I will have fries with that.


~jwf~

>> We still have a pantheon, we just don't call them gods any more, we call them celebrities. <<

Well observed. Saints, celebrities, heroes, rock stars, literary giants, musical geniuses - we continue to seek and find diversity and variety because we need diversity and variety. This is because we intuitively recognise the inherent pattern of diversity and variation in nature.

And yet, while we recognise that change is constant, that variability and multiplicity are the true order of things, we are always attracted to simplification and ease as a form of respite from the chaos.

The idea of a single unifying principle, whether as a god or some abstraction of cosmic physics, is a blasphemy to the real nature of the multiplex that is our constantly changing reality.

Mind you, those singularities called black holes that apparently exist at the center of this and every other galaxy, do tend to focus my attention ocassionally. Maybe the moths know something about candles that we have failed to observe or been forced to forget.


~jwf~

Wow ! what a backlog in one afternoon.

Skipping back a few posts - I am still in hysterics about Mycroft's "dykehopper" (I probably shouldn't be but it tickled me at the time)

And am intrigued about the correspondence between the pyramids and the Belt of Orion.

"Dear Mr Cheops,

I refer to your parchment of 5th Inst. commenting upon the increasingly noticeable twinkle in my Northenmost regions....."

~jwf~ - So what you're contending is that life in late capitalist society as it is now (burgers, internet, increasing secularity, racial and cultural diversity etc. etc.) is actually *simpler* than was life in homogenous organic pre-monotheistic societies (or at least what you imagine life in these to have been like)?

An interesting argument. But it seems counter-intuitive to me.

interesting article on this in today's Guardian. The term has seemingly moved out of hospital usage into the business world for people like me (and jwf?) whose persistence in paid employment is stopping the rise of our juniors.But with the other hand we're being told we have to go on working as long as possible, since said juniors can't afford to look after us (and if you saw the Mother Hubbard state of my pension fund....)I don't, in fact, really fancy being a "retiree"(the local term)- even less lovely than being an OAP.
[the only Mother Goose reference I can think of for horns is "the cow with the crumpled horn in The House that Jack Built]
Gnomon, I still think that dilemmas are related to the "great god Pan" but your etymology is probably less shaky than mine

This refers back to post 8733. What a spate we have opened up in ~jwf~!

Very stimulating, but one thing I cannot take lying down: "limits are always set for good reason".

No they aren't!

>> "limits are always set for good reason". <<

I wish I could take that line down.

My damn ironic voice has failed me again. I keep forgetting you can't actually hear me. I shoulda used a smiley.

At least your emphatic reaction, "No they aren't!", suggests we are in complete agreement on the essense of the matter.

Try reading it again but this time imagine my voice dripping with bitter sarcasm. Sorry to put you to this extra effort. And please, forgive my assumption that considering the source, no one would take that line down at face value.


~jwf~

>> ~jwf~ - So what you're contending is...<<

Oh dear, you seem to have gotten less out of my long tirade than I had hoped. Before I answer, I really should ask if you have any connection to the fast food industry other than as a happy and satisfied customer.

But what the hay. Firstly, I seldom 'contend'; I am not a contentious person, though I will not hesitate to call a trough a trough.

I went to great lengths to point out how much effort, complex planning, timing and hard work goes on behind the scenes to make the consumer-end face of Life seem (as in, appear-to-be) easy and simple.

Those seeking power or profit must work very, very hard to give their product or service (ie: religion, politics, burgers) a sense of being easy and convenient because people prefer things to be simple and easy.

Life is not simple, either now or back then, but the greater part of all our modern institutions is devoted to making them appear so, because we all wish it were that simple and are willing to pay for the illusion.

*looks for visual-aid example of simplicity*

Take the h2g2 logo for example. It is clean, simple and harmonious, using an inverted 'mirror' image of 'h2' to create 'g2'. It suggests the balance and harmony of the classic symbol for ying and yang as well as the eternal and perfect circle. It looks clean and simple but obviously a lot of work and thought went into its design and it represents a whole lot of words and ideas in several communication media and all the people behind and before it all over the globe.

The result is an icon which represents a universe of ideas and the even more complex people who think them. By now it also represents the history of the site, the books, the authour, and all the print audio and video presentation of his ideas. It says a lot to those who know what it's saying.

And yet it is not ornate or intricate or rococo. It is not un-necessarily dteailed or decorative for the mere sake of decoration. It makes no reference to the Founder and Creator or any of his characters or any of his friends who built and nourished his idea of an earthly guidance system. And yet, for those who recognise it, all that is, was, or will be, the HHGttG has been reduced to this simple symbol.

Anyone who knows h2g2 will recognise the symbol, and it will impart to them a sense of all that is h2g2 or at least those parts they are familiar with. The McDonald's arches do the same. They are another symbol that cannot be read aloud as a word but communicate to the inner mind a wide range of concepts like food, fries, comfort, friendship, low price, convenience, instant gratification. The whole idea is contained in a single un-utterable sign.

So, what I am contending is that one god is a lot easier to deal with than a whole whack of gods, demi-gods, half-gods and mythical beasts with weird names and complicated back-stories. The notion of One God is meant to represent all gods and all the mystic forces.

But my point was that such reduction must lose so much content and context that it has no meaning in and of itself. Someone unfamiliar with HHGttG could look at the h2g2 logo all day and night and get no sense of what it stood for. By the same token, monotheistic religions fail to represent the full extent of the cosmic mystery, and fast food burgers fail to be healthy and nutritious.

Or, in brief, 'nothing is as simple as it seems, no matter how much we'd like it to be'. Hardly a contentious or new idea really.


~jwf~

~jwf~ I have no connexion with the fast food industry and I never eat at MacDonalds.

I'm afraid we're at cross purposes here. The analysis of modern iconography is very interesting (though it should be said that if the h2g2 symbol is beautifully simple in itself, the mechanisms by which it appears simultaneously on screens right round the surface of the planet are anything but), but what on earth does it have to do with monotheism? MacDonalds seems to me, as it seems to most people, I suspect, denuded of all spiritual content and its rise, along with that of its corporate siblings, has coincided with a dramatic decline in church attendance (in Europe, anyway) over the course of the last hundred and fifty years. So, a vast and bewildering system of purely secular signs and symbology has arisen in place of the one legitimate symbol, as it were - the cross, the crescent, the Star of David - and yet you see this process as itself monotheistic in origin. Whereas, on the face of it, it seems intrinsically pluralist.

Sorry, hadn't quite finished there. I just wanted to add that if you see modern consumer society as offering an artificial simplicity (somehow derived from monotheistic roots), then fair enough, but it's not how I experience it at all: pick out a single symbol and the argument just about stands up, but not against the context of the fact that, in the space of the last fifteen, I have been exposed to an infinitely broader range of symbols, images and all kinds of cultural costructs, just sitting here in front of this screen, than a human being three thousand years ago would have seen in his or her entire lifetime. In other words, such symbols seem to simplify when isolated artificially, but actually exist in a vast interplay of millions of such symbols, constantly bombarding us. Similarly, you're trying to make a case about modern spirituality on the one hand, while reducing the experience of the modern world to how we eat on the other. Yes, going to MacDonalds is (or, as you rightly say, seems) far simpler than 'hunting your own', but the whole concept of fast food is intended to reduce the time one takes to eat, not because of a desire for simplicity, but because of the demands of all the complexities attached to the vast array of all the other things of which modern life is constituted.

So, on the actual ineffable complexity of existence, I agree with you (who wouldn't?). That modern society is designed to shield us from that, I don't.

>>the last fifteen<< Sorry. That should be "the last fifteen minutes"

I'll stop now

Ah but yes ~jwf~ has a point. All religions are trying to simplify. The Christian churches are all going as close as they dare to atheism. Religious experiences, visions in particular, are a source of real pain to the corporation; you notice how smartly the Vatican acts to stamp them out.

An article in the Guardian about forty years ago said with great credibility that western Christianity is fast approaching Buddhism. One of the first tenets of Buddhism is that there are no gods, no supernatural beings.

Yet the people keep messing it up. They deify saints (particularly Santa Claus -- now there's a cult!) and actors and singers and all-purpose personalities.

And by the way the irony was not lost on me; I just wanted to point out that . . . something, make it up yourself. To do with speaking in many tones at once.

>> ..the cross, the crescent, the Star of David <<

Cross purposes it is then.

But let me just point out that these three symbols, representing the three major monotheistic religions handed down to us by Roman Imperialism, are exactly like the golden arches and the h2g2 logo, in that they are wordless, unutterable signs meant to represent all that each religion stands for (or won't stand for ).

Of course you said all that, And we agree on that.

The point I wanted to make now is that only one of those symbols would continue to exist if we were suddenly without pen and paper, crayons, billboards, TV screens, etc.

In a world unplugged and bereft of writing and drawing materials (it could happen) one need only look up to the sky and there you will see the crescent moon (new moons and full moons notwithstanding). It is the only 'natural' sign and besides being one which ancient man would have known as well, it will still be there (god willing) in a hundred years or a millenium or three. Now how cool is that!

It must have the Christian PR people and the Jewish PR people in a real tizzy that the Muslims have the only symbol that exists in the 'real' world. If they were 'brand managers' at some corporation they'd be fired for allowing the competition to get one up on them.
This single stroke of marketing genius may well give them the ultimate monopoly on god.

~jwf~

I agree - very cool!

(There is the Southern Cross hanging in the sky in the Southern Hemisphere, mind )

Yeah, but constellations are arbitrary drawings of lines between stars.

I'm sure we could manage to make the sign of the cross fairly easily, though. I mean, you can do it with your fingers. And if it's good enough to drive vampires away...?

RF

You have reminded me of another thread. It asked the question "what is the sign of the teaspoon?" It's a line from a Paul Simon song.

A most frustrating and infuriating thread. No one knew the answer. It got revived a couple of times. Still, no one knew the answer.

So I put it to BritEng.


~jwf~

The sign of the teaspoon?

Er...

A teaspoon?

J. Alfred Prufrock measured out his life with coffee spoons
http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html line 51

To step back up the thread a bit, "agnostic" in the sense that Ictoan overheard is usually used to mean "I don't care" rather than "I don't know". In the computer industry, it came about through the wholesale adoption of religious terms to indicate arguments where logic and rational evaluation have been replaced by emotional choices. I don't know whether this is the generic path to adoption.

It is fairly routine in the computer industry to refer to things as being ...-agnostic (e.g. operating system agnostic). The link is that camps with strongly held and opposing views are usually described as "religious" and may be involved in a "holy war". An example is the Mac vs PC debate. Those who feel strongly about this are unlikely to be swayed by the views of the other side, but they go on trying.

The original "holy war" was, I think, between CTSS (compatible time-sharing system), a forerunner of UNIX, and ITS (incompatible time-sharing system) - the very name is an expression of the jihad. Oh, and notice that words like "jihad" and "theology" crop up, too.

For those who didn't get it, "sign of the teaspoon" is a quote from Paul Simon's "Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes":

She makes the sign of a teaspoon
He makes the sign of a wave

I seem to remember hearing Paul Simon talking about this album (Graceland, his favourite at the time). Apparently a lot of it was total free association. There may be more to this one than that, but I doubt it.